The Mercy Lounge gig sold out. Yay! Second time we've done that. They really pack 'em in there, too, so it feels like a lot of people (even though it's just a couple of hundred).
I sat down to play the first song of the night (Greatest American Hero), and had no sound coming out of my rig. SHHHHHHIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIITTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT! Multiple small heart attacks. I tried to be systematic in my thinking. Keyboards have power, speaker has power, rack has power…what the hell? Then I noticed that my mixer had no power. Great…no mixer and we'd have to stop and run separate lines and DIs for each keyboard and the EWI, and then send it through the monitor. I checked the connection on the back of the mixer, and it was good. When I smacked the transformer in my rack, I bumped the plug and the power came back. It turns out that the plug had worked its way ever so slightly out of the power strip. I plugged it back in and away we went.
The adrenaline and all that meant that I did not play particularly well for the first few songs. My head was a little messed up for a while. I finally settled down and things were fine.
The Mercy is LOUD. Brutally loud. I wore ear plugs--I didn't enjoy the gig as much, but my ears were better for it. There's something about that stage (resonating low end notes, it seems to me), that makes the stage sound really loud.
Before we hit the stage, we went and checked out a studio in Nashville where we might do some recording of our originals. Really cool old-school equipment: Chet Atkins' personal mixing console from the 70s, a big 24 track 2 inch tape machine, massive clear Vistalite drum kit, B 3, nice Wurly, a 50s Les Paul that Dannells drooled on. It could be cool. The guy (Dave Cobb) talked to us…lots of recording stuff that was over my head.
Saturday, we rolled back into Atlanta early in the afternoon and went to the Variety Playhouse for the big Thriller/Purple Rain show. This show also sold out. Holy cow! We sold out the Variety!
I did pretty well on this stuff. It really was our first attempt to play Purple Rain (the album) all the way through without stopping. We made it with a few small hiccups. My only cuss-out-loud disaster was that I forgot to play a double chorus in Baby I'm a Star. Other than that, I was pretty solid.
We came back out and played Thriller in storm trooper costumes. I mean, why not?
Thriller was a little rougher for me. Maybe it was because I devoted so much time and energy to Purple Rain; maybe I just couldn't concentrate for that long. I had some flubs along the way. The only real thing that I bit the dust on was Lady in My Life. Bencuya and I realized that we'd left a pretty essential synth part out. I tried to learn it after soundcheck. When we got to that song, I played the part I'd learned pretty well (I got most of it), but the pads that I was supposed to play along with it? No way. I couldn't get my hands to do it. Dropped the pad, played the synth line. Next year, we probably need to restructure that tune between me and Bencuya so that we handle it better.
Since it is Yacht Rock, we had to put a sax solo in there…I walked out front, big adrenaline rush, and I proceed to play massive amounts of bullshit (with delay). Bad, bad, bad. Not wrong notes, bad, but I couldn't connect any ideas…it was diarrhea of the horn.
So…that sucked. The rest of the gig was fine. Our encore was Man in the Mirror…just me and Nick on the intro. I wondered a few weeks ago if I would choke the way I did on Sailing a few years back (that was a fine blog entry). No problems this year.
One cool thing we had this year was a twenty-four person choir. It ended up that they were right next to me, but I honestly never knew they were there. The sound was such (and I was so glued to to what was happening instrumentally) that I never gave them a thought. I bet it sounded good, though.
Bencuya and I were set up in the middle of the stage--the choir outside of me, Mark Cobb outside of him. I was really looking forward to this set up because we'd be able to hear each other well, and honestly I wanted to prove to him that I could play this stuff! I think I hung in there really well.
Putting Cobb in the corner (nobody puts Cobb in a corner!) made it hard to hear him clearly, and I couldn't make any eye contact with him at all. Sometimes when the songs were just loops and a little drums, I really had to hang onto every little thing to make sure I was in time.
Anyway…great gig! I'm getting the hang of it!
Special thanks to Nick, Pete, Esther, and Kristen for putting this show together--it made it really easy for the rest of us to just show up and play.
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